Brendan Nyhan

Reuters sanitizes China crackdown

A Reuters story about the pre-Olympic crackdown on dissent going on in China right now features an especially Orwellian headline:

China announces Olympics stability drive after riot

"[S]tability drive"? What sort of bizarre euphemism is that and why is Reuters using it without scare quotes? (The phrase also appears in the article.) Did they get it from the People's Daily? I know it's difficult for journalists to operate in an authoritarian country, but there's no excuse for parroting official propaganda like this.

Frank Rich reads Charles Black's mind

Frank Rich asserted Sunday that John McCain adviser Charles Black's comments to Fortune magazine (which McCain repudiated) weren't an "improvisational mishap":

Don’t fault Charles Black, the John McCain adviser, for publicly stating his honest belief that a domestic terrorist attack would be “a big advantage” for their campaign and that Benazir Bhutto’s assassination had “helped” Mr. McCain win the New Hampshire primary.

In private, he is surely gaming this out further, George Carlin-style. What would be the optimum timing, from the campaign’s perspective, for this terrorist attack — before or after the convention? Would the attack be most useful if it took place in a red state, blue state or swing state? How much would it “help” if the next assassinated foreign leader had a higher name recognition in American households than Benazir Bhutto?

Unlike Hillary Clinton’s rumination about the Bobby Kennedy assassination or Barack Obama’s soliloquy about voters clinging to guns and faith, Mr. Black’s remarks were not an improvisational mishap. He gave his quotes on the record to Fortune magazine. He did so without thinking twice because he was merely saying what much of Washington believes.

Even if we grant that the second paragraph is satirical hyperbole, the third paragraph makes a direct claim -- that Black's remarks "were not an improvisational mishap" because he "gave his quotes on the record to Fortune magazine." In fact, however, the remarks were almost certainly an improvisation -- Fortune, not Black, raised the issue of another terrorist attack on the US, as Bob Somerby pointed out (emphasis added):

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December was an "unfortunate event," says Black. "But his knowledge and ability to talk about it reemphasized that this is the guy who's ready to be Commander-in-Chief. And it helped us." As would, Black concedes with startling candor after we raise the issue, another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. "Certainly it would be a big advantage to him," says Black.

You certainly can't assert that Black intentionally raised the issue -- that is, unless you write novels about politics for a living.

Ted Koppel vs. numbers

Maybe I'm being unfair, but when Ted Koppel misspeaks and tells Jon Stewart that China has "1.3 million people," I can't help but think of his 2000 comment about the debate over George W. Bush's proposed tax cuts:

KING: OK. Were you impressed with this fuzzy, top 1 percent, 1.3 trillion, 1.9 trillion bit?

KOPPEL: You know, honestly, it turns my brains to mush. I can't pretend for a minute that I'm really able to follow the argument of the debates. Parts of it, yes. Parts of it, I haven't a clue what they're talking about.

The quantitative illiteracy of the press corps is a national disgrace.

Interest in a comment feed?

Are people interested in an RSS comments feed? The comments have been more active lately and a feed would make it easier to keep up with the back-and-forth. Let me know what you think...

Leibovich's Style section imperialism

Mark Leibovich, formerly of the loathsome and regrettably influential Washington Post Style section, continues to infect the New York Times with nonsense like this about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's clothing and (supposed) body language:

Woodstock or no, Unity at least provided the ultimate festival for students of political body language. Mr. Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and Mrs. Clinton appeared arm in arm, waving to a cheering crowd. U2’s “Beautiful Day” blared over loudspeakers, sputtering out for a few nervous seconds before recovering. Mr. Obama’s too-long blue tie went nicely with Mrs. Clinton’s blue pantsuit.

Once on stage, Mr. Obama placed his hand on Mrs. Clinton’s shoulder but stopped short of a full hug. There was minimal physical contact between the two throughout, though they shared a few close whispers, punctuated by laughter. He waved, she waved, often in opposite directions. There was no joint raising of hands. She smiled deferentially while he spoke, hands folded at her waist.

Are Leibovich's ties always the right length? Why is that detail relevant?

Since coming to the Times, Leibovich has (among other things) psychoanalyzed Hillary's signature, referred to her campaign as "Version 08, Nurturing Warrior, Presidential Candidate Model," compared Al Gore to a recovering alcoholic, and gratuitously pointed out that Gore has gained weight. What a hire!

The Bush/McCain small business fallacy

For almost ten years, George W. Bush has repeatedly dissembled about the impact of his tax policies on small business (among other demographic groups). Many people (including me) have pointed these things out to the press. But as Paul Krugman points out, McCain is using the same playbook to vastly overstate the effect of Barack Obama's planned rollback of Bush's upper-income tax cuts on small business and it's still working:

John McCain makes a typically Bush-like conflation: there are 21 million small business owners; there are small business owners in the top two tax brackets; therefore, Barack Obama plans to raise taxes on 21 million small businesses. It was nonsense, of course. (Most living things are microbes; men are living things; therefore, most men are microbes.) But sure enough, McCain’s claim is being reported as a fact.

Update 6/29 9:00 AM: Per David's request in comments, here is the relevant excerpt from McCain's speech:

Currently, there are the 21.6 million sole proprietorships filing under the individual income tax. When Senator Obama talks about raising income tax rates on those making over 250,000 dollars -- that includes these businesses as well.

Here's what I wrote in a comment below about McCain's tricky use of language in this passage:

McCain's quote obliterates the some/all distinction in exactly the way that Bush does on this issue (hence the headline). Rather than clarifying that the increase would not apply to the whole group, he says "that includes these businesses as well" -- a phrase that suggests that all 21.6 million small businesses face an increase. If he instead said "that includes *a small fraction* of these businesses as well," I would have no objection.

McCain's supposed non-POW exploitation

John McCain is a genuine war hero, but how many times can he and his political campaigns exploit that experience before the press stops claiming that he doesn't exploit it?

McCain, who rarely discusses what is perhaps the most compelling element of his biography, used the new language twice on Tuesday to bring up his refusal to take early release in Vietnam.

"When I was offered a chance to go home early from prison camp in Vietnam, I put my country first,” McCain said on a conference call Tuesday night with independent and Democratic voters in South Florida. “And I’ve been doing that ever since."

In fact, however, McCain's campaigns have repeatedly promoted his POW experience since his failed 2000 presidential campaign.

EITM blogging slowdown

Apologies for the limited blogging -- we are currently hosting the seventh annual summer institute on Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models here at Duke. I'm both a participant and a graduate assistant so posting will be intermittent for the next couple of weeks.

Stimson and Franklin horse race estimates

UNC's James Stimson (the country's leading analyst of macro public opinion) is posting daily horse race estimates for the presidential race on his website. Right now he has Obama at 53% of the two-party vote:

It's almost exactly consistent with the estimate by Wisconsin's Charles Franklin that appears at Pollster.com:

[Note that, unlike Stimson, Franklin's graph covers 2007 as well as 2008. Also, he includes lines for both Obama and McCain.]

Clark Hoyt on Maureen Dowd's sexism

Clark Hoyt, the New York Times public editor and a national treasure, calls out the retrograde sexism of Maureen Dowd:

Dowd’s columns about Clinton’s campaign were so loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband that they could easily have been listed in that Times article on sexism, right along with the comments of Chris Matthews, Mike Barnicle, Tucker Carlson or, for that matter, Kristol, who made the Hall of Shame for a comment on Fox News, not for his Times work.

...[T]he relentless nature of her gender-laden assault on Clinton — in 28 of 44 columns since Jan. 1 — left many readers with the strong feeling that an impermissible line had been crossed, even though, as Dowd noted, she is a columnist who is paid not to be objective.

...Politically correct is never a term one would apply to Dowd’s commentary. Her columns this year said Clinton’s “message is unapologetically emasculating,” and that she “needed to prove her masculinity” but in the end “had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim.” In one column Dowd wrote, “She may want to take a cue from the Miss America contest: make a graceful, magnanimous exit and wait in the wings.”

...Even she, I think, by assailing Clinton in gender-heavy terms in column after column, went over the top this election season.

As Bob Somerby points out, Dowd's response is utterly disingenuous:

“I’ve been twisting gender stereotypes around for 24 years,” Dowd responded. She said nobody had objected to her use of similar images about men over seven presidential campaigns. She often refers to Barack Obama as “Obambi” and has said he has a “feminine” management style.

...“From the time I began writing about politics,” Dowd said, “I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes.” Now, she said, “you are asking me to treat Hillary differently than I’ve treated the male candidates all these years, with kid gloves.”

Somerby's response is exactly right:

Who knew? Readers, had it even crossed your mind that Dowd was trying to make this point? That Dowd has been trying to “force [us] to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes?” We’ll confess—we’ve read Dowd closely for more than a decade, and it never so much as entered our head that this was her lofty intention!

...[L]et’s get clear on one basic point: No, she hasn’t done this sort of thing to Democrats and Republicans alike. Let’s quote Digby on this point: “Her ‘twisting of gender stereotypes’ has turned every Democrat into a mincing ponce or a blubbering mama's boy and every Republican into a macho, scotch drinking throwback or an arrogant jock.” Once in a while during Campaign 2000, Dowd did picture Candidate Bush blubbering for his “beloved feather pillow.” But she has constantly turned Dem Males into girls—and she constantly switched the scam with her trashing of man-woman Clinton.

Confusing hate group quote on Obama

In a Washington Post article on increasing traffic to white supremacist websites as a result of Barack Obama's presidential nomination, there's a puzzling quote from the leader of one of the hate groups:

"I haven't seen this much anger in a long, long time," said Billy Roper, a 36-year-old who runs a group called White Revolution in Russellville, Ark. "Nothing has awakened normally complacent white Americans more than the prospect of America having an overtly nonwhite president."

"[A]n overtly nonwhite president"? What does that mean? Was there a "covertly" nonwhite president that I missed? Or is it some sort of implicit reference to Toni Morrison calling Bill Clinton the "first black president"? I don't expect white supremacists to make a lot of sense, but it's strange for the Post to use it as the first quote in the piece without an explanation.

Update 6/24 12:29 AM: Aha! In comments, Jeff suggests that Roper may have been referring to the possibility that Warren G. Harding was part black. The New York Times Magazine article he links to says "the circumstantial case for Harding’s mixed-race ancestry is intriguing though not definitive."

The strange Obama financing debate

It's amusing to me that the defense of Barack Obama's decision to refuse public funding centers on the idea that no one will have leverage over him because he has so many small donors. It exposes the essential silliness of campaign finance reform rhetoric. Consider the opposite case. Even if all his donors were maxing out, why would Obama care what one person gave him? What leverage would they have? The maximum federal contribution is $4600 (primary and general). He's raised over $200 million.

Ironically, Obama's reliance on small donors actually increases their leverage over him. Rather than raising money from self-interested donors who want private benefits -- any one of whom can be ignored at little cost -- he has to appease vast legions of liberals who will be upset if he pivots toward the center. To the extent that future candidates follow his lead, elections will be more polarized than they are today.

PS Expect to hear more about this soon from Washington establishment types bemoaning the death of centrism. It's tomorrow's David Broder today!

Update 6/23 8:16 PM: In comments, Willie correctly points out that so-called "bundlers" can package together contributions that add up to much more than $4600. But even a top-level bundler who raises $200,000 or more is a tiny fraction of what will ultimately be a $400-500 million campaign. They just don't have any leverage.

MoveOn promotes McCain "100 years" myth

MoveOn.org is running an ad that reinforces the myth that John McCain wants to continue the Iraq war for 100 years:

Hi, John McCain; this is Alex. He’s my first. So far, his talents include trying any new food and chasing after our dog — that, and making my heart pound every time I look at him. So, John McCain, when you said you would stay in Iraq for 100 years, were you counting on Alex? Because, if you were, you can’t have him.

As I've written before, McCain didn't say what the ad suggests. Here's the New York Times fact-check:

In several forums last January, Mr. McCain said he could envision a United States troop presence in Iraq for 100 years or more. But he did not mean to advocate a prolonged war, and he was clearly speaking in terms of a peace-keeping presence. The quotation Democrats most commonly refer to was from a town-hall-style meeting on Jan. 3 in Derry, N.H., when a voter mentioned that President Bush had spoken of “staying in Iraq for 50 years.” Mr. McCain interrupted to say, “Maybe 100.” But his comment came in the context of a broader lecture equating such a decades-long mission to American troop deployments in South Korea and Japan. He had also included a pretty big “if,” saying that such an enduring presence in Iraq, “would be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.”

Update 6/21 8:43 AM: Also, as commenters note, John McCain won't be president when "Alex" reaches draft age and he certainly won't be president in 100 years.

David Leonhardt's questions for McCain

New York Times business reporter/columnist David Leonhardt has three questions for John McCain about his tax plan, which is disturbingly reminiscent of George W. Bush's 2000 tax proposal in its use of gimmicks and its failure to add up:

A week before Pennsylvania's Democratic primary... John McCain traveled to Pittsburgh to remind everyone how different his economic agenda would be from theirs.

In a speech that day, he said he would abolish the dreaded alternative minimum tax. He said he would also allow companies to write off spending on new equipment more quickly than they now could, effectively reducing their taxes. Most ambitiously, he vowed to set up a simpler income tax system, one that anyone could voluntarily use instead of the current tangle. In the months since then, Mr. McCain has repeated these vows.

Fast forward to last week, when a Washington research group called the Tax Policy Center set out to estimate the budgetary effects of Mr. McCain's and Mr. Obama's plans, after having talked with the campaigns about the details. Almost immediately, the center's report became the yardstick that journalists and bloggers used.

To anyone who has been following the campaign closely, however, there were some strange things in the report's summary. The alternative minimum tax? Mr. McCain apparently no longer wants to abolish it. The write-off for corporate equipment? It exists for a few years, but then it disappears. The simple new tax system? Gone.

...Here, then, are three questions that I hope Mr. McCain will answer soon:

No. 1: Are you really going to eliminate the alternative minimum tax?

...Mr. McCain, in speeches, is perfectly clear about what he wants to do: "Abolish the A.M.T.," as he said to a conservative group. Yet his campaign told the Tax Policy Center that "Senator McCain does not plan to repeal the individual A.M.T."

...In the fine print of his plan, he doesn't abolish the tax. Instead, he "patches" it, so that it would continue to apply to roughly the same number of households as it did last year — about one out of every 30. (Mr. Obama's A.M.T. proposal isn't so different.) The trick is that no one would actually pay the tax under the McCain plan. As Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a campaign adviser, explained to me, anyone hit by the A.M.T. could opt into Mr. McCain's voluntary, simplified tax system, where their taxes would be lower.

Of course, no matter what it's called, an effective elimination of the A.M.T. will cost the government a lot of money — about $60 billion a year. As a point of comparison, the entire deficit is projected to be $300 billion a year during the next president's first term.

No. 2: Are you serious about tax simplification?

If I told you that you could choose between two different set of tax rules, I'm guessing that you would pick the one that required you to pay less in taxes. Such a system, then, would have to cost the Treasury a good bit of cash. It's inherent.

Fred Thompson, during his brief campaign, proposed a system along these lines, and the Tax Policy Center estimated that it would have increased the deficit by some $600 billion a year. "It would be the largest tax cut ever, by a large margin," said the center's director, Len Burman (who, I should add, has been careful to note what his calculations do and do not include).

The McCain campaign says its proposal won't be the same as Mr. Thompson's, but the two certainly are similar. Mr. Holtz-Eakin is responsible for coming up with the details, he said, and he is under orders "to make it revenue neutral." That means the plan will pay for itself — that it will include tax increases to offset the reductions. When Mr. McCain describes those increases, you'll know he's serious about tax simplification.

No. 3: Are you going to use gimmicks to make your numbers add up?

In 2001, President Bush signed a 10-year tax cut with a novel feature. In the final years of the cut — 2009 through 2011 — it began disappearing, making the cost look smaller than it otherwise would have. Now that those final years have arrived, however, Mr. Bush argues that Congress should restore the tax cut.

Mr. McCain agrees... Yet his campaign agenda includes one of these same sunset provisions (which wasn't apparent until the Tax Policy Center analysis came out). The new rule on corporate deductions for equipment lasts only until 2013, when the old rule — with its higher taxes — returns. This gimmick, obviously, helps reduces the proposal's apparent cost.

McCain's Obama/Ahmadinejad ad

John McCain is currently running a banner ad online that puts a picture of Barack Obama and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad side by side (screenshot of it on my site):

I'm not one of those people who demands that negative ads can't ever use pictures of hated foreigners like Osama bin Laden, but doesn't this seem a bit pernicious given the misperceptions about Obama being a Muslim?

Orrin Hatch warns of "Democratic tsunami"

How bad are things for the GOP? In a fundraising letter to the National Republican Senatorial Committee email list, Senator Orrin Hatch warns that "the coming Democratic tsunami" could lead to a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate (PDF):

For all of us, there comes a time when the choices are so stark, the risks so great, we have to take a stand. We can no longer assume someone else will save us. We have to step forward and be counted.

We face such a time today. If we don't take a stand against the coming Democratic tsunami, the country we know and love today will be lost.

...Just this week, the Senator in charge of raising money to get Democratic Senators elected said they are going to pickup nine seats in the US Senate. Nine seats! Do you know what that would mean! That would mean they could pass every piece of their liberal agenda through the House and the Senate untouched! There would not be a tax they could not raise or a freedom they could not abridge.

...I am doing all I can to ensure the Democrats don't have a super-majority. You need to do all you can to help.

As part of his email, Hatch misstates Democratic tax plans, saying that "I believe the Democrats when they say they plan to double our taxes." What evidence is there to support that claim? In fact, contrary to both Hatch and John McCain, Barack Obama would cut income taxes on Americans with incomes under $75,000 while rolling back the Bush tax cuts for people with higher incomes.

Does Obama's health care plan save money?

Last week, I questioned Barack Obama's statement that "over the long term we will save money" under his health care plan, which suggests that the plan actually decreases government health spending in the long term. This is not true. However, estimates for Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker's health care plan, which is similar to Obama's plan, show that it would reduce national health spending.

At the end of the post, I asked for feedback from blogosphere health policy wonks Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn. Over the weekend, Klein stepped up. The short answer is that cost savings from Obama's plan are ambiguous:

[T]he answer to whether Obama's plan will save us money? A definitive maybe.

First off: Barack Obama's plan is not Jacob Hacker's plan. In the update to his post, Nyhan mentions the Lewin analysis of Jacob Hacker's plan, which shows that Hacker's plan will save about $1.1 trillion over its first decade. But the mechanism for those savings are a rule Hacker places on his group market, which caps per person spending increases at the growth of GDP plus one half of one percent per year. That's a much lower rate of growth then the system currently exhibits, and Hacker is achieving it basically by government fiat -- the government will adjust reimbursement rates in order to meet the spending requirements. In other words, the group market has price controls (for a more in-depth explanation of these controls, and how the two plans differ, see this article). These controls account for approximately $1 trillion of the plan's $1.1 trillion in savings.

Obama's plan has a similar structure to Hacker's plan, but it doesn't explicitly include that provision. In an e-mail to me, Hacker argued that it could be implicit. "It really depends," he said, "on what they end up doing with the public plan alternative. Assuming it uses Medicare-like rates and bargains for prescription drug prices, it's going to have the leverage to bring down costs. The crucial issues are (a) how many people end up in the public plan and (b) whether the payments to private plans within the purchasing pool are tied to the average cost of the public plan. If the answer to (a) is 'many' and (b) is roughly as Medicare currently does it, with risk-adjusted payments based on average per capita costs, then the public plan will not only have leverage, but in addition the payments to the private plans will be contained insofar as the public plan's costs are contained. The candidates will need to spell this out, but they certainly have not ruled it out and, indeed, the architecture of their plans is set up to facilitate it."

Hacker's right about that. Obama has left the cost controls ambiguous (though a more cynical observer, like me, would say he's simply removed them), and adopted a structure that could easily support them. As a matter of policy, it's extremely easy to see how they build upon the underlying architecture of the plan to implement effective cost controls. As a matter of politics, however, it's much harder. I've little doubt that a President Obama would like his health care plan to save money. But cost controls through spending caps are a tough political sell, and if Obama can't get to 60 votes with them, he'll try and get to 60 votes without them.

The question then becomes whether Obama's plan without the "hard" cost controls will save us money. Because it does have what I call "soft" cost controls -- prevention programs, health information technology, a comparative effectiveness board that could, over time, help us waste less money on useless treatments. Will those provisions wipe out the spending from increased access? Probably not. Comparative effectiveness could have huge impacts down the road, but in the 10 year timeframe we're talking about, you can't confidently predict huge savings. These provisions will save some money, but not necessarily enough to put us in the black.

In his post, Klein also quibbles with my interpretation of Obama's statement that "I think over the long term we will save money":

Brendan Nyhan questions whether Barack Obama's health care plan "would actually cause a net reduction in government health care spending." Except that Obama doesn't say it would cause a net reduction in government health care spending. In the quote Nyhan offers, Obama says, "I think over the long term we will save money because people will be getting regular checkups, regular screenings." The "we" here refers to what the "we" in health care spending usually refers to: National health care spending.*

...*Nyhan has a bit of a sleight-of-hand at the end of his post. He concludes by writing, "In short, while the Hacker plan would reduce total national health spending, it's still projected to cost the federal government approximately $50 billion more per year than the status quo." That's like saying the new buying system will save our business millions of dollars, but it's still projected to cost our secondary checking account $10,000 more per year. Nyhan is leaving the impression that under Hacker, spending goes up. But it doesn't. Slightly more of it is shifted to the government's dime, but that's paid for through premiums. As it is, all health spending actually comes out of our pockets. We pay for it in premiums, taxes, wages, and fees. The question, then, isn't whether one or another of our intermediaries (Cigna, the government) is paying more, but whether we're paying less. And under Hacker's plan, we are. It saves money.

Klein's statement that "The 'we here refers to what the 'we' in health care spending usually refers to: National health care spending" is too broad. Policy analysts and politicians frequently refer to the projected costs of health care plans to the government rather than their net effect on national health spending. For instance, Klein himself referred to estimates of the costs to the government of both the Edwards ("$90 billion and $120 billion a year") and Obama ("$50 billion and $65 billion a year") plans.

It's also strange to suggest that American politicians and policy analysts don't refer to government actions using the pronoun "we." Obama does. ("For what we spend in several months in Iraq, we could be providing [people without health care] with the quality, affordable health care that every American deserves.")

Finally, at a more general level, it's bizarre for Klein to try to rule out any discussion of the relative change in government spending associated with a health care plan. From a distributional perspective, the extent to which health care costs are paid by the government matters quite a bit. And from a fiscal policy perspective, the projected costs of a new health care plan need to be funded to avoid widening the federal budget deficit.

Fred Hiatt revives "Bush lied" debate

Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt has returned us to the morass of the tiresome debate about whether President Bush lied about the war in Iraq -- the same one that bogged down Jon Stewart's interview with Scott McClellan.

Hiatt quotes a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report saying "the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent," suggesting this is equivalent to saying Bush "lied," and then points to conclusions in the report that appear to exonerate the President.

In response, Brad DeLong lists bullet points from the report that he says are "six of Bush, Cheney, and now Hiatt's lies":

• Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa'ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa'ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
• Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
• Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
• Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq's chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community's uncertainties....
• The Secretary of Defense's statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes... was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
• The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001...

Similarly, Matthew Yglesias calls Hiatt's editorial "preposterous" and describes the "war sales pitch" as "deeply dishonest," "not supported by the evidence," and a "dishonest tapestry."

Once again, however, the problem with this debate is the way it becomes hung up on the word "lies." As I noted in the Stewart post (among others), the word "lie" implies an outright falsehood made with conscious intent. But (a) we can never prove intent and (b) most of the Bush administration's deceptions are exaggerations, false suggestions, and half-truths rather than outright falsehoods (as in DeLong's list above). Why can't we just focus on the problems with (b) rather than wasting more time on this pointless debate?

Will Lieberman lose his chairmanship?

Last month, I argued that Democrats will end up deciding not to strip Joe Lieberman of his chairmanship in the next Congress for fear of causing him to switch parties. But based on Lieberman's increasingly aggressive rhetoric, Josh Marshall is suggesting in a post and video that the Connecticut independent will be stripped of his position.

There's certainly a strong case to be made that Lieberman has forfeited his right to any favors from the party, but I don't think people realize how costly it will be to strip him of his chairmanship. Here's what I wrote back in May:

The Lieberman-defenstrators out there don't appreciate the fact that the Connecticut senator's overall voting record in the current Congress is actually pretty close to the middle of the party. If he switches parties, that's unlikely to continue -- previous party switchers have drastically changed their voting patterns. The resulting shift would make it that much harder for a President Obama to end Republican filibusters and get his agenda passed. My guess is Democrats will realize this and let Lieberman stay in the caucus.

With Democrats projected to end up with approximately 55-57 seats in the next Senate, do they really want to raise the bar on every bill by one more vote?

Do people really know John McCain?

TNR's Noam Scheiber flags an interesting quote from Obama strategist David Axelrod:

“Even though Senator McCain has been on the scene for three decades, there are a lot of people who don’t know a lot about him — and there are a lot of people who don’t know about us,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior strategist. “Both campaigns are about to begin filling in the gaps.”

Scheiber interprets Axelrod as claiming that the "McCain brand isn't nearly as familiar to most people as we in the political media assume," which will help Obama because it will be "much easier (and cheaper) to create an image on a blank slate than it is to replace an existing one."

But I don't think this is quite right. Clearly, McCain is well-known to the public. I think Axelrod is saying that people "don't know a lot" of negative information about him. The reason is that McCain was for some time one of the few politicians who both Democrats and Republicans praised. Until recently, he had never been the subject of serious criticism from the left at the national level. As a result, his public image was and is softer than someone who's already withstood a great deal of criticism from the other party. (Imagine Bill Clinton in, say, 1996.)

The problem for Democrats, however, is that Obama's never faced serious criticism from the right at any level.

Post-nomination Obama smear watch

Bringing you up to date on the Obama smear front, the RNC listed Barack Obama's past profession as "street organizer" on an opposition research website; Fox News referred to Michelle Obama as Barack's "baby mama" in an on-screen graphic; Washington Times editorial page editor Tony Blankley concluded a column on Obama by asking "Dictator or democrat? Radical or liberal? Who in the world is this man?" (via Andrew Sullivan); and Fox News contributor Dick Morris suggests that the question that plagues Obama concerns his feelings about this country: "Is he pro-American? How does he feel about white people?"

For the record, Hillary Clinton conceded the Democratic nomination five days ago.

How liberal is Obama on the economy?

There's been a surge of stories describing the Obama/McCain debate over the economy as some sort of throwback to the 1980s. For instance, a day after NPR reporter Adam Hochberg described Obama's economic plan as "heavy on working class populism," NPR host Michele Norris framed Obama's plan as "tax and spend liberalism" in an interview yesterday:

Now, as you well know, John McCain is also out this week talking about the economy. His campaign has already said that your "Change that works for you" campaign really amounts to change this country can't afford. The GOP has used the same argument for decades, that tax and spend liberalism is bad for America. "Tax and spend" is almost a hyphenated phrase that's become equivalent a dirty word. Are tax and spend policies really bad for America or is that what you're intending to do?

Obama is probably the most liberal Democratic nominee since Michael Dukakis, but these descriptions are a caricature. His top economic advisers are establishment moderates (University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee and Brookings Institution economist Jason Furman); his health care plan, while ambitious by historical standards, is more cautious than Hillary Clinton's; and his proposals to raise taxes on the wealthy largely represent a return to the status quo before President Bush took office. In addition, Norris is implicitly misrepresenting the effect of Obama's tax plan on most Americans. As the New York Times points out this morning, he would actually reduce taxes on Americans making less than $75,000.

However, I do take issue with Obama's claim during the Norris interview that "over the long term we will save money" under his health care plan:

John McCain doesn't have a plan to make health care affordable and accessible to every American. I do believe that it's important for wealthier Americans to contribute a little bit more by giving up some of the Bush tax cuts so that we can provide health care to every American. I think over the long term we will save money because people will be getting regular checkups, regular screenings. That's something that John McCain does not do.

To me, this suggestion sounds disturbingly reminiscent of the phony supply-side claim that tax cuts pay for themselves. I'm sure that Obama's plan would generate some savings from preventive care, but I've never seen a serious estimate suggesting that any plan like his would actually cause a net reduction in government health care spending. Is there any support for that idea? Over to you, Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn...

Update 6/12 12:57 PM: In comments, Matt points to the Lewin Group's analysis of the Jacob Hacker health care plan that was the basis for the Democratic plans (PDF). Here's a summary:

Last week, the Economic Policy Institute released an important analysis of Jacob Hacker’s Health Care for America (HCFA) plan by the respected health economics team at the Lewin Group. As you can read in the EPI press release, Lewin found that HCFA would cover everyone in America, while saving the U.S. economy over a trillion dollars over the next decade. And the efficiencies achievable primarily through Hacker's public health insurance plan would save enough money that, after modest premiums from employers and individuals, the new system would cost the US government only $50 billion more than what we are paying now for a system that leaves millions uninsured or badly insured.

In short, while the Hacker plan would reduce total national health spending, it's still projected to cost the federal government approximately $50 billion more per year than the status quo.

Update 6/12 7:29 PM: Per my point above, the progressive labor economist Jared Bernstein wishes Obama had chosen more liberal economic advisers.

GOP Cong. insiders on global warming

The National Journal Congressional Insiders poll asked a group of Republican and Democratic members of Congress whether "it's been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made pollution." In their responses, which are anonymous except for party ID, a disturbing 74 percent of Republicans said no. NJ provides a selection of textual responses to the question, including these choice quotes:

"In the '70s, the 'consensus of scientists' was that we were beginning global cooling. Now it is global warming. Excuse me if I am skeptical of this newest form of secular religion. Perhaps we should pause and take a breath before we drink the new Kool-Aid!"

"What has been proven is that a well-targeted pop-culture campaign can trump even the best of science. The bad news is, a very few will get very rich, and the rest of us will foot the bill with mythical creations like cap and trade. The impact of such programs on the environment: Zero. The cost to the American public: Huge. The grin on Al Gore's very wealthy face: Priceless!"

"It's been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Democrats are OK with the idea of surrendering our spot atop the world economy."

My favorite, though, is this quote, which indicates a complete lack of understanding of the scientific process:

"If there's one thing poll after poll indicates, it's that the science is not settled on this issue."

How can polls tell us about whether the science is settled?

NYT fact-checks McCain on taxes

The front page article in the New York Times on the presidential candidates' economic plans includes excellent fact-checking of two misleading Republican talking points:

[W]hile Mr. McCain has portrayed his tax cuts as benefiting the middle class, most of the benefits would go to the wealthy and to corporations, including his calls for the elimination of the alternative minimum tax.

...While Mr. McCain asserted in a speech in Washington on Tuesday that under Mr. Obama’s tax plan Americans of every background would see their taxes rise, Mr. Obama’s plan calls for cutting taxes on people earning less than $75,000 a year and for eliminating federal income taxes on elderly citizens who make less than $50,000 a year.

However, one problem with the lack of an institutionalized fact-checking operation is that the newspaper fails to draw on previous reporting, as in this passage from the story:

Experts say that both the McCain plan and the Obama plan would increase the deficit, and that neither man has adequately explained how his proposals would be paid for. But several analysts have said they believe that Mr. McCain’s plan would increase the deficit more, because of the size of the tax cuts he is seeking.

Why the vagueness about analysts who "believe" McCain's plan would "increase the deficit more"? It's not a close call -- the NYT reported back in April that the impact of Obama's plan "would be less than one-third that of the McCain plan."

Similarly, Media Matters points out that the NYT contradicted itself on Obama's health care plan. An article on Monday falsely suggested Obama and Clinton supported "government-run health care" even though the newspaper previously reported that McCain "inaccurately described the Democrats' health care proposals, using language that evokes the specter of socialized medicine."

Wacky leadership PAC names

Apparently, Rep. Jim McCrery (R-LA) is so worried about the looming socialist threat that he named his leadership PAC Committee for the Preservation of Capitalism. Who knew capitalism needed preserving?

John McCain on other wars

Via Brad DeLong, Digby notes the irony of this passage from John McCain's forward to David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest:

It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay. No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone.

As I noted last December, he said something similarly ironic about the US presence in Lebanon back in 1983:

The fundamental question is "What is the United States' interest in Lebanon? It is said we are there to keep the peace. I ask, what peace? It is said we are there to aid the government. I ask, what government? It is said we are there to stabilize the region. I ask, how can the US presence stabilize the region?...

The longer we stay in Lebanon, the harder it will be for us to leave. We will be trapped by the case we make for having our troops there in the first place.

What can we expect if we withdraw from Lebanon? The same as will happen if we stay. I acknowledge that the level of fighting will increase if we leave. I regretfully acknowledge that many innocent civilians will be hurt. But I firmly believe this will happen in any event.

Will anyone in the press ask him about these quotes?

Ensign sets a low bar for GOP Senate seats

How bad are things looking for the Republicans in November? Congressional insiders and expert observers expect Democrats to pick up approximately 4-6 seats, which would give them 55-57 and leave Republicans with 43-45, but National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman John Ensign is publicly setting a goal of preserving a floor of at least 41 Republican seats -- the minimum necessary for a filibuster:

The chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee says Sen. Saxby Chambliss will be a key part of the firewall the party wants to build against stronger Democratic control of Congress.

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., set a floor on the number of Senate seats the party must control: 41.

"The number that we get to is really, really important in the U.S. Senate," he said. "That's one of the reasons Saxby absolutely must hold his seat."

Democrats now have 49 seats with two independents who vote with them. Republicans hold 49, with 23 up for re-election this year, and five GOP senators retiring. Democrats only have to defend 12 seats this year.

By holding at least 41 Senate seats, the GOP would prevent the Democrats from having the 60 votes required to end filibusters, which prevent votes on bills.

Mr. Chambliss said last week that he expects a tough contest no matter who the Democrats run against him.

Setting the bar that low can't be confidence-inspiring for Republicans. Are things worse than we think? Chambliss isn't expected to face serious opposition.

[Disclosure: I worked for the 2000 Senate campaign of Ed Bernstein against Ensign in Nevada.]

John McCain: "it's a Google"

Who says John McCain is old and out of touch? Barack Obama may fist-bump his wife, but McCain can namedrop the hip new search engine that all the kids are using:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain joked on Monday that Google, the popular Internet search engine, had made investigating his list of potential candidates a little bit easier.

"You know, basically it's a Google," he said to laughter at a fund-raising luncheon when asked how the selection process was going. "What you can find out now on the Internet -- it's remarkable."

"[I]t's a Google"? Really? I'm pretty sure no one under 60 talks like that. It's one step removed from Ted Stevens's "a series of tubes".

Update 6/10 11:32 AM: Matthew Yglesias links, prompting one of his commenters to remind us that President Bush had a similarly awkward-sounding reference to "the Google" back in 2006:

HOST: I’m curious, have you ever googled anybody? Do you use Google?

BUSH: Occasionally. One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see — I’ve forgot the name of the program — but you get the satellite, and you can — like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.

Hillary's loss: The defeat of dynasticism

If we can briefly set aside the debate over Hillary Clinton's merits as a presidential candidate, it's worth noting the ways in which her loss represents a victory for our democracy.

First, two decades of Clinton/Bush dominance of the American political system will finally come to a close in January, preventing further entrenchment of the dynastic politics that I fear. (Similarly, on the Republican side, George W. Bush's massive unpopularity seems to have killed off any lingering enthusiasm for Jeb Bush as a presidential candidate.)

In addition, while it looked like the front-loaded primary calendar would result in the quick selection of early frontrunners, both parties ended up choosing nominees who were significant underdogs in late 2007.

It's always hard to accept the defeat of your preferred candidate, but these are signs that the American republic is alive and well.

Return of the ANWR bait and switch

Before leaving for Europe this morning, President Bush took the opportunity to claim that drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) would "give this country a chance to help us through this difficult period by finding more supplies of crude oil, which will take the pressure off the price of gasoline":

I'll also remind them, though, that the United States has an opportunity to help increase the supply of oil on the market, therefore, taking pressure off gasoline for hardworking Americans, and that I've proposed to the Congress that they open up ANWR, open up the Continental Shelf, and give this country a chance to help us through this difficult period by finding more supplies of crude oil, which will take the pressure off the price of gasoline.

However, it's unlikely that ANWR will "help us through this difficult period" by "[taking] the pressure off the price of gasoline." The reason is that it would take years to develop and the amount of oil it would produce represents only a small fraction of domestic oil consumption -- a quantity that is unlikely to have a significant impact on prices in the global oil market.

It's yet another example of the Bush administration using a crisis or problem to justify a pre-existing policy proposal that is unlikely to solve the problem (see: the tax cuts, the invasion of Iraq, etc.).

Update 6/11 9:07 AM: Here's more from Media Matters.

Astrophysicists with polls running amok

Dear New York Times opinion editors,

Please don't publish op-eds from astrophysicists applying polling projection methods five months away from the general election:

If the general election were held today, Mr. Obama would win 252 electoral votes as the Democratic nominee, while Mrs. Clinton would win 295. In other words, Barack Obama is losing to John McCain, and Hillary Clinton is beating him.

Andrew Gelman provides the needed corrective:

Um . . . no, "if the general election were held today" is not a particularly interesting question. The polls can move a lot in 5 months. Remember President Dukakis? See here (from our 1993 paper):

The triangles on the right side of each plot are the actual election outcomes, and the little arrows on each graph show the dates of the Democratic and Republican conventions in each year. As you can see, polls this early are in many cases not even close to the outcome.

Thanks,
Brendan

Elisabeth Bumiller reads Bush's mind

Via Spencer Ackerman and Matthew Yglesias, Russell Baker quotes this swami-like passage from Elisabeth Bumiller's biography of George W. Bush in the New York Review of Books:

[Bush] had never met anyone like Rice. She could talk baseball, football, and foreign policy all at the same time, but she did not sound like an intellectual and she never made him feel inadequate or ignorant. On the contrary, Rice made Bush feel sharper, particularly when she complimented him on his questions. Bush did not know many black people well, and it made him feel good about himself that he got along so easily with Rice. It was hard not to see that she was also attractive, athletic, and competitive, and, like him, underestimated for much of her adult life.

Yglesias's reaction is to condemn Bush, but why should we trust Bumiller's account? It reads like a Woodward-style attempt to project an omniscient understanding of her subjects' thoughts. And while I'm sure she interviewed Rice extensively, there's no way Bush or Rice told her that "it made him feel good about himself that he got along so easily with Rice."

The UC-Berkeley love for "protesting via tree"

I love this quote from a UC-Berkeley undergrad in The New Yorker:

Personally I have never understood the idea of protesting via tree, but I know many of my classmates find it admirable.

Somehow it seems to sum up the ethos of a place where tree-sitters and non-tree-sitters live in harmony.

Featured on new RealClearPolitics blog

I'm happy to announce that I'm one of the featured bloggers at the new Cross Tabs blog at Real Clear Politics. It's a bipartisan cross-posting blog that will aggregate posts from a number of political bloggers. Besides me, the contributors are Justin Gardner, Kyle Moore, Betsy Newmark, Jon Keller, Sister Toldjah, Michael Stickings, and Michael van der Galien. Hope you'll check it out. (Note: All my posts will still appear here first.)

The remarkable rise of Barack Obama

Matthew Yglesias notes how improbable it was that Barack Obama would win the Democratic nomination:

The fact that Obama's had this kinda sorta wrapped up since March 5 has tended to obscure the fact that his primary victory has got to be the greatest upset in the history of American presidential politics. In retrospect, whatever happens looks obvious and somewhat inevitable, but back in the day all that was obvious was that Clinton had the party locked down. Obama's entire meteoric ascent from the State Senate to the cusp of the presidency is just a very, very, very unlikely story.

It's worth underlining this point. Consider, for instance, the Intrade futures market price on Obama winning the Democratic nomination, which represents his predicted probability of winning. It shows that he was given very little chance of winning as late as winter 2007:

John McCain was considered dead in the water during the same period:

In fact, the futures price on an Obama vs. McCain race was given near-zero probability as late as early December (note: the history on this contract only goes back to January 2007):

We haven't had a campaign without a sitting president or vice-president since 1952, and both parties end up choosing candidates who were considered relative longshots. What an incredible year for politics.

More insinuations Obama is un-American

Chris Matthew continues his efforts to suggest that Barack Obama is different and not a "regular" American:

MSNBC's Chris Matthews criticized Sen. Barack Obama's expression of patriotism, asserting that Obama "thank[s] America" because he "got certain things from it," rather than, Matthews claimed, "express[ing]" "that gut sense of Americanism," which, Matthews said, is "a hard thing for someone like Barack Obama ... to express." He also purported to distinguish Obama from "regular" Americans, saying: "People that don't have anything, including beautiful families and Ivy League degrees, know what they got. They're Americans."

...As Media Matters has also documented, Matthews has a history of purporting to identify actions by or characteristics of Obama that he has suggested demonstrate that he is not a "regular guy," including playing pool, ordering "weird" beverages like orange juice, and his bowling skills.

Similarly, National Review Online's Greg Pollowitz objected to the playing of U2 at Obama's rally Tuesday night because the group isn't American (via TNR's Ben Wasserstein):

U2's "Beautiful Day" is playing at the Barack Obama rally. No Americans write music Obama likes?

Now that Obama is the nominee, we're going to see a lot more of this garbage.

David Brooks on Obama and salad bars

It's easy to be a pop sociologist because you can just make things up:

On MSNBC, David Brooks asserted that "less educated" and "downscale" people "look at [Sen. Barack] Obama, and they don't see anything," adding: "And so, Obama's problem is he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who could go into an Applebee's salad bar, and people think he fits in naturally there." Applebee's officials have confirmed to Media Matters that its restaurants do not have salad bars.

The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson had the best response: "I tend to take the sociology a little more seriously when it's delivered by people who actually eat at Applebee's, you know, more than once in a decade."

Brooks's statement follows in the proud footsteps of Chris Matthews, who criticized Obama for shooting pool, which Matthews asserted falsely is mostly played by "people with money," and for the way he ordered orange juice at a diner.

Hillary: For Hillary

Is Hillary Clinton trying to reinforce the stereotype that she is calculating and power-hungry? I'm not the only one who noticed that she doesn't seem to be putting the party first.

Two other points:

(1) The idea that Obama must appease her and her supporters or they will not back his campaign is reminiscent of the way that Democrats were held hostage to identity politics in previous decades.

(2) I don't understand her endgame. One interpretation is that she's trying to solidify her position as the frontrunner for 2012 if Obama loses in November, but she's generating so much resentment among Obama supporters that it will arguably damage her standing within the party.

Update 6/4 1:47 PM: Matthew Yglesias notes in response that Hillary's favorability ratings among Democrats have only dipped slightly, which is a fair point. However, I think it's reasonable to believe that her standing among Democratic activists and donors who are backing Obama has dropped off much more sharply. Also, it's important to remember that the only way she can run in 2012 is if Obama loses. And if that happens, she will receive a substantial amount of blame for the loss, which will drive down her support across the party.

John McCain's anti-partisan tics

As many observers of John McCain have noted, one of the reasons the press loves him so much is the way he signals his disdain for normal politics. Even when McCain delivers partisan attack lines, he winks and nods to reporters as if to say "I know this is silly."

The problem his speech last night revealed is that those tics seems to have become so ingrained that, as Josh Marshall writes, McCain seems to "[find] it impossible to pretend he's actually thinking what he's saying." The cheesy fake smiles that were interspersed with his attacks on Obama -- which the press may appreciate as signals of insincerity -- only enhanced the phoniness of the effect on television.

On a more substantive level, embracing the idea of "change" is probably the right idea given the political fundamentals, but -- like Hillary -- McCain's identity and length of service mean that he will never take that role away from Obama. Also, unlike Hillary, he has few policies to promote that actually would represent significant changes from the current administration. In short, he's boxed in, which means his message will ultimately boil down to the claim that entrusting Obama with the presidency is too risky.

The tiresome Bush lies debate

On Monday night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart got bogged down in a semantic debate with Scott McClellan about whether the Bush administration "lied" and the extent to which its deceptions were willfull:

But as we wrote in All the President's Spin (which Stewart generously praised back in 2004), this debate is unproductive -- Bush rarely says things that are completely false and we can't ever know people's intentions:

George W. Bush's dishonesty is different. Rather than simply lying, he has subtly and systematically attempted to deceive the nation about most of his major policy proposals. On issues ranging from tax cuts to stem cells to the debate over the war in Iraq, he has consistently twisted the truth beyond recognition in order to promote his policies.

Remarkably, he has done so while generally avoiding obviously false statements. Instead, Bush consistently uses well-designed phrases and strategically crafted arguments to distract, deceive, and mislead. The result is that all but the most careful listeners end up believing something completely untrue, while proving the President has lied is usually impossible.

Unlike famous White House dissemblers of the past, Bush almost never explicitly claims that black is white or day is night. Instead, he deceives the public with partial truths and misleading assertions... Because Bush's statements are so often constructed in this way, he has walked away from one deceptive claim after another scot-free.

...A better approach is to judge public officials' words against the known facts. We should focus on what the President and his top aides knew or should have known to be false or misleading at the time they made a public statement. By that standard, George W. Bush has been extraordinarily deceptive about public policy issues.

I think this is a standard for public debate that Stewart and McClellan could agree upon. It's too bad they wasted so much time on semantics.

McCain waffles on GOP abortion plank

In a New York Review of Books essay on John McCain, Michael Tomasky points out something I missed -- McCain is backing off his previous support for changing the GOP platform to allow legalized abortion in the case of rape, incest, or risk to the mother's life. As Tomasky writes, "This is as extreme a position on abortion as exists in American electoral politics." Platform issues may be obscure, but this could give Barack Obama a bludgeon to use when criticizing McCain's potential Supreme Court appointments. Look for the issue to come up again in the next few months.

Why Hillary 2008 is like George W. Bush 2000

On WashingtonPost.com, Chris Cillizza reports that the Clinton campaign is denying an AP story stating that Hillary will concede tonight.

More importantly, though, notice how Cillizza describes her rationale for continuing:

The Clinton campaign, in fact, released a statement insisting that the Associated Press story that fueled this maelstrom was not correct; "Senator Clinton will not concede the nomination this evening," the statement asserted.

Language is important here. An acknowledgment of Obama securing the delegates he needs to formally become the party's nominee is NOT the same thing as a concession by Clinton.

Over the past few days, Clinton has focused almost exclusively on the popular vote count -- all but ignoring the delegate race in a seeming concession of her inability to overcome Obama in that metric.

Therefore, Clinton may well use the national spotlight tonight to do two things: acknowledge Obama has the delegates he needs while also trumpeting her popular vote edge. Clinton could then spend the next 24 hours (or so) taking the pulse of committed and uncommitted superdelegates about their willingness (or lack thereof) to take her side.

A little-known fact about the 2000 race is that George W. Bush's campaign planned to challenge a Gore victory in the Electoral College if Bush won the popular vote. Ironically, of course, Bush won under that exact scenario.

In the last few weeks, Hillary has followed in Bush's (almost) footsteps by attempting to discard the agreed-upon institutional metric for determining the winner of the race and undermine the rule-based outcome. Beyond the obvious absurdity of changing the rules at the end of the campaign, the problem is that we can't know what would have happened had either campaign been conducted solely on the basis of the popular vote.

PS Setting aside the debate over the different ways you can add up the caucus and primary popular vote totals, what makes Hillary's argument more absurd is that Democrats prefer Obama in national polls.

Update 6/3 3:45 PM: Per comments below questioning my claim about a planned Bush challenge, I've pasted an original article from the New York Daily News below the fold.

Clark Hoyt on the Luttwak op-ed

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt, who has already outshone his ineffectual predecessor, devoted his entire column Sunday to debunking a controversial Edward Luttwak op-ed published in the Times several weeks ago (via Matthew Yglesias):

ON May 12, The Times published an Op-Ed article by Edward N. Luttwak, a military historian, who argued that any hopes that a President Barack Obama might improve relations with the Muslim world were unrealistic because Muslims would be “horrified” once they learned that Obama had abandoned the Islam of his father and embraced Christianity as a young adult.

Under “Muslim law as it is universally understood,” Luttwak wrote, Obama was born a Muslim, and his “conversion” to Christianity was an act of apostasy, a capital offense and “the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit.” While no Muslim country would be likely to prosecute him, Luttwak said, a state visit to such a nation would present serious security challenges “because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards.”

...The Times Op-Ed page, quite properly, is home to a lot of provocative opinions. But all are supposed to be grounded on the bedrock of fact. Op-Ed writers are entitled to emphasize facts that support their arguments and minimize others that don’t. But they are not entitled to get the facts wrong or to so mangle them that they present a false picture.

...I interviewed five Islamic scholars, at five American universities, recommended by a variety of sources as experts in the field. All of them said that Luttwak’s interpretation of Islamic law was wrong.

...Interestingly, in defense of his own article, Luttwak sent me an analysis of it by a scholar of Muslim law whom he did not identify. That scholar also did not agree with Luttwak that Obama was an apostate or that Muslim law would prohibit punishment for any Muslim who killed an apostate.

...Luttwak made several sweeping statements that the scholars I interviewed said were incorrect or highly debatable, including assertions that in Islam a father’s religion always determines a child’s, regardless of the facts of his upbringing; that Obama’s “conversion” to Christianity was apostasy; that apostasy is, with few exceptions, a capital crime; and that a Muslim could not be punished for killing an apostate.

...All the scholars argued that Luttwak had a rigid, simplistic view of Islam that failed to take into account its many strains and the subtleties of its religious law, which is separate from the secular laws in almost all Islamic nations. The Islamic press and television have reported extensively on the United States presidential election, they said, and Obama’s Muslim roots and his Christian religion are well known, yet there have been no suggestions in the Islamic world that he is an apostate.

...Shipley, the Op-Ed editor, said he regretted not urging Luttwak to soften his language about possible assassination, given how sensitive the subject is. But he said he did not think the Op-Ed page was under any obligation to present an alternative view, beyond some letters to the editor.

I do not agree. With a subject this charged, readers would have been far better served with more than a single, extreme point of view. When writers purport to educate readers about complex matters, and they are arguably wrong, I think The Times cannot label it opinion and let it go at that.

More of this, please. Any chance the Times wants to keep Hoyt on permanently?

Impeaching Bush for being unpopular?

Brad DeLong, who frequently cites reasons he believes George W. Bush should be impeached on his weblog, has now called for Bush to be impeached because he is unpopular:

For a president to be so unpopular that congressman who represent highly rural parts of the prarie would rather spend time with their families than go to Bucyrus, Kansas to be photographed with the president--that is an impeachable offense.

Is this a joke? Since when did being unpopular meet the standard of "high crimes and misdemeanors"?

Update 6/3 9:21 PM: DeLong writes in a comment below that this post is "simply not fair" but doesn't offer a specific objection.

Scott McClellan: Late to the party

I don't have much to say about Scott McClellan's new book except to note the close similarities between the analysis of the selling of the war in Iraq in my favorite book on the subject and his description of it -- in particular, the shared emphasis on (1) an elaborately planned PR campaign and (2) the administration's strategic reliance on half-truths rather than outright falsehoods.

All the President's Spin (p. 145):

The White House turned to tactics it had used in previous political fights to build public support. Mustering as much damning evidence as possible, the administration executed a carefully crafted public relations campaign centering on Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction.

McClellan:

In the autumn of 2002 Bush and his White House engaged in a carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval to our advantage. We'd done much the same on other issues -- tax cuts and education -- to great success, but war with Iraq was different. Our lack of candour and honesty in making the case for war would later provoke a partisan response from our opponents that further distorted and obscured a more nuanced reality.

All the President's Spin (p. 145):

[T]he White House glossed over gaps in intelligence and caveats about sources, frequently presenting worst-case scenarios as fact. Officials also used loaded rhetoric to make suggestions that could not be proven and invoked powerful images, such as a "mushroom cloud," when discussing the threat Iraq posed.

...[T]he administration presented ambiguous information as if it were certain and used exaggerated rhetoric to present claims based on patchy evidence. At times, it also invoked connections, such as a link between the September 11 attacks and Iraq, which its own evidence did not support... [T]he overall pattern is one of sacrificing ambiguity for the sake of selling the war.

McClellan:

...[T]he administration chose a different path -- not employing out-and-out deception but shading the truth; downplaying the reason for going to war; trying to make the weapons of mass destruction threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more certain than they were; quietly disregarding some of the crucial caveats in the intelligence and minimising evidence that pointed in the opposite direction.

They also encouraged Americans to believe as fact some things that were unclear and possibly false (for example, that Saddam had an active nuclear weapons programme) and other things that were overplayed or wrong (for example, that Saddam might have had an operational relationship with Al-Qaeda). In late August, at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville, Cheney said: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us."

...As the campaign accelerated, caveats and qualifications were downplayed or dropped altogether. Contradictory intelligence was largely ignored or disregarded. Evidence based on high confidence from the intelligence community was lumped together with intelligence of lesser confidence. A nuclear threat was added to the biological and chemical threats to create a sense of gravity and urgency. Support for terrorism was given greater weight by playing up a dubious Al-Qaeda connection to Iraq.

By contrast, the Wall Street Journal editorial page dismisses McClellan's claim that the administration used "propaganda" to sell the war by stating that Bush "[had] no choice but to make his case" (poor guy!):

[A]ny U.S. President has no choice but to make his case for going to war. It is an obligation of democracy. In Iraq, the long march to the 2003 invasion included months of debate at the U.N. and in Congress.

Outside of the WSJ, however, I think most Americans recognize the distinction between making your case and systematically distorting the evidence. That's why a majority of Americans now believe that the administration "deliberately misled the American public about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction."

Finally, per Ezra Klein, it's important to note that the publication of this book does not excuse McClellan from his role in promoting the administration's deceptions.

How to think like Maureen Dowd

On the May 25 edition of Meet the Press, Tim Russert asked Maureen Dowd about the contrast between a sharp exchange between Barack Obama and John McCain and a less cutting joke he told about Obama at a different event. Dowd's answer, which again demonstrates her amazing ability to read minds, is revealing of the way that she and pundits like her construct cartoon psychodramas: this exchange from the May 25 Meet the Press was revealing of the way that Maureen Dowd thinks:

RUSSERT: Maureen Dowd, is it two John McCains on display?

DOWD: I think we learn something very interesting from this exchange. For one thing, McCain really doesn't like Obama. And, you know, he thinks he's the punk who hasn't bled, as McCain people like to say, and doesn't deserve to be in this arena. And we also learn that Obama is not as intimidated by John McCain as he was by Hillary Clinton. He is much freer when he goes on the attack, much more confident.

Amazingly, Dowd's crystal ball has revealed that McCain "really doesn't like" Obama, thinks "he's the punk who hasn't bled," and that Obama "is not as intimidated by John McCain as he was by Hillary Clinton." But more importantly, note how her silly psychologizing substitutes for any strategic explanation of Obama and McCain's actions.

For instance, while we can't know whether Obama was intimidated by Hillary, a more likely explanation of why Obama aggressively attacked McCain is that McCain is that not a member of the same party. Primary campaigns are not the same as general election campaigns -- Obama needs Hillary's supporters on his side in November. Similarly, John McCain has to attack Obama aggressively because (a) the political fundamentals are so bad for the GOP this year and (b) the conservative base doesn't fully trust or accept him.

What's made Dowd such a phenomenon is this talent for stripping away context in order to interpret all conflict in politics as personal and psychological. It's the only way to churn out soap opera-style narrative week after week. And it's made her rich and famous.

Protecting the Clinton brand at all costs

Todd Purdum's long inquiry into the various questionable aspects of Bill Clinton's post-presidency in Vanity Fair shows how wrong Hillary Clinton is to claim that she (unlike Barack Obama) had been "vetted."

But to me, the most outrageous part of the article is this response to Purdum from Clinton spokesman Jay Carson, who suggests Democrats should refrain from criticizing Clinton to "protect a strong brand for the party":

The sensitivity among Clinton’s staff to these questions is such that, after I posed some queries about Clinton’s relationship with Burkle and Co., a spokesman, Jay Carson, e-mailed me this comment: “The ills of the Democratic Party can be seen perfectly in the willingness of fellow Democrats to say bad things about President Clinton. If you ask any Republican about Reagan they will say he still makes the sun rise in the morning, but if you ask Democrats about their only two-term president in 80 years, a man who took the party from the wilderness of loserdom to the White House and created the strongest economy in American history, they’d rather be quoted saying what a reporter wants to hear than protect a strong brand for the party. Repubicans look at this behavior and laugh at us.”

He's not an ethically challenged ex-president, he's a "strong brand"! Memo to Carson: It does not enhance Clinton's brand to have his staff refer to him as such.

The larger lesson here is how both sides of the debate have adopted the tactics and strategies of corporate PR. In that sense, Carson's statement is reminiscent of the famous Andrew Card quote about the rollout of the campaign for war in Iraq: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." For more, see All the President's Spin.

(Note: Clinton's staff later distributed a long memo attacking the article.)

Update 6/3 9:09 AM: A reader points out that Bill Clinton was not the "only two-term [Democratic] president in 80 years." Carson meant to write 60 years, presumably.

Also, via Mickey Kaus, Mayhill Fowler at Huffington Post asked Clinton about the Purdum article and received a long harangue about how Purdum is a "scumbag" for which Carson later apologized (link includes audio). That's not exactly presidential behavior -- what happened to protecting the brand?